


blood ballet

by hysteries



Series: beginning middle end (dimension 20 alphabet 2021) [2]
Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Anger, Campaign 05: A Crown of Candy, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Let Ruby Rocks be angry 2k21, Moving On, Post-Canon, Some of the other characters are here too but this is mostly Ruby!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-14 14:40:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29668782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hysteries/pseuds/hysteries
Summary: In the months she spends at Castle Candy after the war, Ruby Rocks learns to live with the ghosts of the past and the possibility of a future.
Relationships: Caramelinda Rocks & Ruby Rocks, Saccharina Frostwhip & Ruby Rocks
Series: beginning middle end (dimension 20 alphabet 2021) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2179170
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19
Collections: Dimension 20 Alphabet 2021





	blood ballet

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Dimension 20 Alphabet 2021 collection. My prompt was **books** and the title was taken from _Blood Ballet_ by Maggie Rogers. As always, please feel free to check me out on Twitter [@nellgwyns](https://twitter.com/nellgwyns).
> 
> I love Ruby Rocks. I love her so much. I love her joy and how to her, a perfect future is a life in the circus, making others laugh. I love her anger, her rage at her enemies and how it propels her forward. I love her indecision, and her immaturity, and how hard she loves, and how hard that makes it for her to open up to new people. I love how she loses everything that makes her special — her twin, her status as a princess, even the importance of her magic being gifted by Lazuli — and how she has to reshape herself in the wake of that. I understand that she's so deeply stuck in the past, and I'm endlessly fascinated by how she could navigate a future. 
> 
> I was actually going to do a completely different prompt today, but I just couldn't get Ruby out of my head, and here we go. In what Siobhan said for Ruby at the end of the campaign, I see her desire to go out into the world and make everybody laugh as a desire to learn and grow. And that's what I tried to capture her. Ruby learning and growing, from books and her mother and her tutor and her sister, even while she's literally surrounded by the past. I wanted to write her angry and resentful (sorry, Theo and Cumulous, nothing against you guys!), but also give her some kind of happiness. After all, she finishes the campaign at 18. She has her whole life ahead of her. I hope I captured some of that in this piece!
> 
>  **TW** for grief and the death of a sibling

Some people say that Castle Candy is filled with ghosts, stuffed with the bodies of all those who fell in its name. They imagine princesses overflowing with arrows and knives, a saint carrying her own head in her hands, a mage turned to dust. Spirits who move through the walls and moan for justice. They say, _no one can travel the halls at night, not if they want to survive till morning_.

Ruby knows better than anyone that that’s a load of bullshit. Castle Candy isn’t full of anything. It’s empty.

There might be loads of troops and marauders and even a dragon on the grounds, but nothing can fill the hole inside the walls. Really, the only ghosts in the castle are them. The survivors. Those who made it through the impossible and rose back up, triumphant and victorious.

If Jet’s ghost were here, Ruby would know it. She wouldn’t be quiet.

Jet left traces all over the castle. Her room, adjoined with Ruby’s, sits just as she left it. Dresses pushed to the back of the closet, trousers and blouses thrown across the floor. _I need something that says I’m available, but also dangerous, y’know? Tough but sexy._ Whatever she’d chosen in the end was long gone. Her equipment is still in the armory, too. Her teenage armour hangs next to Ruby’s, the training sword that Cal – Cruller – gifted her drooping limply from the wall. Her portrait hangs kitty-corner to Ruby’s in the main hall and, across the building, they’re building her statue.

And then there’s Theo’s snake, but Ruby can’t think about that. Won’t think about it.

(It’s not Jet, can’t be Jet, because Jet would never leave a part of herself behind for Theo and forget about Ruby, of all people, she just wouldn’t, not in a million billion years, she wouldn’t forget Ruby, she wouldn’t leave Ruby behind)

Jet’s all over this place, but she’s not _here_ , and Ruby can’t stand to live in the absence of her. The only answer, then, is to carve out her own place within the castle. To claim the one room that Jet never ventured into, and never would.

Castle Candy’s library is ornate, extravagant, and gigantic. Its walls are painted in jewel tones, reds and golds, and crystal-candy glitters from the hanging lights. There’s not a shadow of darkness in this place, all thanks to Aunt Lazuli, who’d made it a pet project of hers. Ruby wonders if Aunt Lazuli’s responsible for the quiet too, a silence so soft that it feels warm. Paintings stretch from wall to wall, but no portraits among them. They’re all landscapes, the sugar-dusted peaks of the Great Stone Candy Mountains and the sprawling lime-green fields of Meringue. Places Ruby’s imagined going dozens of time.

When she’s in the library, surrounded on all sides by books and stories and records, Ruby forgets about the emptiness of the castle. All she hears is Lapin’s slow drawl in the back of her mind, and her mother’s resigned advice. _If you love Dulcington so much, why don’t you learn something about it?_

For the first time in her life, Ruby listens to her mother.

Book after book, record after record. Histories of the Rocks family going back generations. The family trees criss-cross into beautiful patterns across the pages. Ruby reads about her ancestors and forefathers, about the people who lived in the borders she took so much for granted. Her favourite is Queen Bundtica, the widow of King Zingy, who protected her daughters’ birthrights by riding on horseback across the country and fighting every Fructeran who got in her way. The Commoner’s Queen, they’d called her, because she’d spent one raucous night in every town across Candia during her lifespan. Ruby thinks she might like to do that, someday.

Then, she moves into recent history. That gets harder. Ruby’s fists clench when she reads about the Sugar Plum Fairy, so hard that her knuckles crack. She cries for an hour when she finishes a history of the Ravening War, breathing big hiccupping sobs that echo throughout the entire chamber. She forces herself to read theories about Aunt Sapphria’s schemes and gentle hymns to Aunt Citrina, retraces Aunt Rococoa’s wide steps across battlefields and Aunt Lazuli’s intricate infrastructure improvements. When she’s done with all of that, she moves onto maps. Memorizing one of Dulcington, and then one of Candia, coaching herself on village names and regional traditions. Her mother was right all along. 

Whenever her eyes start to blur over, she spends time thinking about Lapin. How his paws must’ve ghosted over the same tomes that she pours over, how he knew so much more than she could ever possibly fit in her brain. She wonders if he would be proud of her, if he could see her now. If he cared about her at all. If he thought of her like —

She doesn’t look out the window because she knows Theo’s there, training his troops down below.

Saccharina joins her, sometimes. Ruby doesn’t mind. This place is new, fresh. There are no memories for her to hoard greedily from her sister, none for Saccharina to carelessly stamp all over. In this ancient room, there’s space for the two of them.

Once, Rina levitates her to reach the spellbooks on the highest shelf and loses it at the last second. Without her magic, Ruby can’t catch herself in time to stop her fall. She lands squarely on Rina with a dramatic _crash_. They lay there, tangled up in hysterics, shrieking out laughs that are amplified by the emptiness of the room.

“I’ve never done anything like this before,” Saccharina cries out between giggles.

Ruby has. A million schemes gone wrong with Jet, a thousand accidents in the castle. But she doesn’t say that. She can’t summon Jet’s memory in here, where she doesn’t belong. Instead, she reaches over and pokes her older sister.

“Stick with me, kid,” she intones, “I’ll show you the way.”

Another time, weeks later, Cumulous pops into space behind her. He wants to catch her off-guard, she knows, but she’s not the same girl she was months earlier. There’s no off-guard for Ruby anymore. Without an invitation, he drones on about magic and preservation and the work Saccharina’s doing and what Ruby has to left to learn. Which is rich, given that he lost all interest in her the moment Saccharina showed up.

But Ruby understands why now that she can see him clearly. Remembers her aunt’s books. She’s not made up of Lazuli’s magic, and that’s why he prizes her less than the weapons he cradles so closely to his chest.

“Thank you,” she cuts him off ever-so-sweetly, testing a new cadence in her voice. It’s silky soft, closer to Caramelinda than Ruby’s ever sounded before. “But I’m done taking advice about how to live my life from lonely adult men.”

He’ll tell Theo about this, she realizes as he shoots out the window with a blast of pink air.

She finds that she doesn’t care.

In the end, he does one better and tattles to Rina, who confronts Ruby with a stern look that quickly melts into a tight hug and a big smile.

“You’ve gotta tell me how you did it. He was shaking in his boots. Cumulous! He’s not afraid of anything!”

Ruby shrugs.

“Guess I’m learning some stuff in here after all.”

Lapin had a little cot set up in a corner of the library, wedged comfortably between a shelf of fairytales and a window. It looks out, not on the training fields, but on a wall of Castle Candy that captures the deep orange of the sunrise perfectly. Ruby takes it for herself. It’s easier to sleep there than in the emptiness of her bedchamber.

When she wakes up in the morning, she trains herself not to look for Jet.

Once she’s memorized every monarch’s name, she decides to try the Muffinfield dialect. Years ago, Lady Donetta had sat beside Ruby and Jet at a feast and taught them curse words under her breath. _Just don’t tell your mother_ , she’d winked at them. Now, Ruby sounds out those words on her tongue, balancing on one leg with a book in her hand. She mouths, _arsehole_ , and thinks of Cruller. _Fucking arsehole_ , she tries again, and remembers her Pops slicing him in half.

Theo never comes after The Cumulous Incident, as dubbed by Saccharina. Ruby can’t blame him. What’s the point?

By the time her parents visit, she’s fluent. At least, as fluent as she can be without knowing a native speaker (not anymore). She tries out the new dialect with the kitchen maids, doing handstands and backflips as they correct her pronunciation. She makes them laugh, in the same gasping way that she’d sent Rina giggling in the library, and finds that she loves the sound.

Of course, she doesn’t speak Muffin around her folks. That much is obvious.

She spends an afternoon in the training field with Pops, practically glued to his side. He grins and claps Theo on his back; Ruby looks Princess in the eye and sees nothing of her twin at all. She wishes she could tell Theo that, but there are some wounds even she isn’t cruel enough to reopen. He won’t meet her eyes, but she tries to meet his.

 _If you’re going to try to kill someone, at least have the decency to look them in the face,_ she wants to say. But then Pops wraps his arm around her again, and Theo’s a blip in her backstory again.

They spar a little, her and Pops, but their hearts aren’t in it. She’s not Jet. She can’t pivot or parry. The fight in her’s a different shade of the sweet. In the end, she shows him her backflips and her round-offs, and he cheers loud enough to spook the birds on the castle roof, and that’s enough.

Afterwards, she goes back to the library, and finds a new presence in the quiet. Someone else in her sanctum.

“Mum?” She calls out.

The locket of the Sweetest Heart is alive against her chest, almost like it’s breathing. Caramelinda steps out from behind a shelf, her own half of the locket gleaming gold and beautiful.

“Have you been sleeping in here?”

Ruby could lie, but there’s no point. Her mother always susses her out.

“Some nights. It’s – I can’t be anywhere else.”

There’s a long beat of quiet, and then her mother nods as if she understands. Ruby thinks that, in her own way, maybe she does. Just a couple days before, her mother had crumpled to her knees in front of their family portrait with Jet’s name in her mouth, and Ruby and Sir Maillard had to help her to her feet. And isn’t that how she feels, whenever she steps into a space Jet used to occupy? Crumbling, like dust, like ancient history, like the world’s moved on long past her.

“Your aunt used to do the same,” Caramelinda interrupts.

“Lazuli?” She asks. As much as she’s tried to reconcile herself with the fact that she isn’t Aunt Lazuli’s _Chosen One_ (she’s nobody’s Chosen One), Ruby still feels a jolt of pride at any similarity between them.

“Sapphria. She didn’t go on her missions completely blind. Research was important to her.”

Sapphria. Ruby thinks back to the missives she’s read and the folk stories that the bards committed to memory. Sneaky Sapphria, spot her anywhere on the continent and she’ll be gone in a second.

Sapphria’s not Lazuli, doesn’t have a legacy of myth and magic, but Ruby finds that she doesn’t mind.

“I read about her. We’ve got some of her journals in here – did you know that?”

Her mother’s eyes widen, her face drawn. She’s surprised, Ruby guesses. Which is fair – Ruby wasn’t exactly a scholar when her mother lived here.

When Jet was alive.

“You found them?”

“They weren’t hard to find.”

“But you looked?”

“Course.” Ruby raises an eyebrow. “Took awhile, but I finally figured out the classification system. I did listen to Lapin sometimes, you know.”

Her mum still looks shocked, and Ruby can’t help it. She giggles.

“Mum, come on! You’re looking at me like I’ve just shaved off all my hair!”

“Honestly, sweetheart, that would be less of a surprise.” But something changed in her mom’s face when Ruby started to laugh. It’s the beginning of a smile. She looks beautiful – and happy. Ruby can’t remember the last time she’s seen her happy. “I was the one that saved her journals, you know.”

“Really?”

“Someone had to. Sapphria’s work – it couldn’t go to waste. She was important.”

Like she imagined Lapin before, Ruby pictures her mother in this room. Elegant gown sweeping the floor as she carried books into shelves, placing them next to each other to ensure that they could be found in the future.

With a sudden burst of warmth overtaking her, Ruby leaps over to her mum and loops her arm around her.

“Thank you,” she mutters. Gratefully, shyly. The words taste strange on her tongue; Ruby can’t remember the last time that she’s spoken them to her mother.

There’s another moment of stillness, and then she feels her mum’s lips brush against her forehead.

“Thank you,” she repeats.

They stand like this for however long, until Ruby’s breath evens and slows. The quiet of the room envelops them, but her mother’s presence no longer feels strange or alien. If anything, Ruby feels more comfortable in the room than she’s felt before; lighter.

Caramelinda nudges her with her shoulder. “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d love to see what you’re studying.”

“Really?”

“Really,” her mother echoes. “I’m fascinated by whatever it was that finally got you reading.”

Ruby looks at her mother and scrunches up her face, sticking out her tongue. They start to walk forward, towards the table where Ruby has a map of Dulcington spread out, highlighted by neighbourhood.

“Well, I thought about what you said…” She starts, and then carries on until her throat gets dry and sore. Her mum listens all the while, interjecting every so often with a correction or a question. Ruby doesn’t find that she minds. It’s more of a conversation than they’ve had in years – maybe ever. She tells her mum the stories she’s learned, about druids of dark chocolate and dairy curses on mariners’ ships. About how, before Dulcington was a city, it was a town, and it had a harvest festival every year that made icing flowers bloom far and wide.

The library isn’t quiet anymore. It certainly doesn’t feel empty. Ruby feels herself filling it – and maybe the entire castle up – with her words and her stories.

And she feels a little less like dust. A little more alive.

There are no ghosts in Castle Candy.

Ruby would know.


End file.
